Tremors Beneath the Surface: Women’s Voices from Central Asia
brings together features, shorts, and experimental works from Central Asia and its diasporas, assembling a layered portrait of women’s lives. The films are bound not by a single storyline but by the tremors that run beneath them: silence carried across generations, memory interrupting the present, endurance woven into the textures of the everyday.
Longer Than a Day by Malika Mukhamejan, Madina by Aizhan Kassymbek, and Bikechess by Assel Aushakimova unfold alongside two film constellations: Unearthed Lives, a selection of narrative and documentary shorts where women stand at thresholds of grief, abandonment, and resilience; and Echoes and Traces, experimental and essayistic works where memory, desire, and history emerge through fragments, atmospheres, and metaphor.
Taken together, these films resist the flattening gaze so often imposed on Central Asia. They neither explain nor generalize. Instead, they dwell in multiplicity: sensuous, vulnerable, defiant. This is a cinema of whispers and interruptions, where survival does not announce itself but insists on being felt — beneath the surface, steady and unignorable.
Part I — Unearthed Lives: Women at the Threshold
This strand gathers narrative and documentary shorts where women confront turning points that expose the quiet labor of survival. Whether mourning a parent, keeping a theatre alive against collapse, or facing abandonment in moments of political turmoil, the protagonists reveal how silence is inherited yet unsettled. These films move between rural and urban spaces, between adolescence and adulthood, mapping an emotional geography of resilience at the edge of change.
Part II — Echoes and Traces: Experimental Cartographies of Love, Loss, and Memory
Here, cinematic language itself becomes a site of resistance. Diaries, myths, landscapes, and absences take the place of linear storytelling, allowing what is unsaid and unseen to emerge. Queer intimacy endures across silence and distance, maternal history returns through myth, an endangered lake speaks through poetry, and the textures of a single day turn into a meditation on healing. Together, these films create alternative cartographies of identity and survival — fragments and traces that resonate where words fail.
Feature films
The feature films in this program open expansive perspectives on women’s lives, where intimacy, labor, and desire are shaped by silence, fatigue, and resilience. Each film unfolds contradictions rather than resolving them, showing how the everyday — whether in rural isolation or within the fractures of urban life — is charged with history and unease. Together they insist on complexity, refusing to flatten experience into a single image or voice.
Join us for a dinner in collaboration with Barricade collective before the screening at ACU, for a Q&A with Malika
Mukhamejan after the screening in KINO, for a talk with filmmakers and artists
Darya Andijan, Aiganym Mukhamejan and Polina Piddubna after the screening in Framer Framed and for a performance by
Darya Andijan accompanying the screening in Plaatsmaken!
Drawing workshop Scene & Seen
After the screening at Cavia and Plaatsmaken.
‘Scene & Seen: A’ is a hands-on workshop that explores the concept of Asianness through the lens of Asian cinema, using film as a catalyst to examine and reinterpret cultural identity. Participants will engage with iconic scenes, objects, and moments from film to create experimental visual responses—doodles, sketches, and compositions—that reflect their impressions and lived experiences. As part of the Asian Movie Night Seasonal Festival, this session invites participants to reimagine the boundaries of Asianness through color, texture, and form, transforming fleeting cinematic images into personal visual definitions of culture.
PROGRAM of CAVIA Amsterdam
Saturday 25.10.2025
20:00
Doors open
20:30 - 20:40
Introduction
20:40 - 22:00
Short Film Program Part I
Unearthed Lives: Women at the Threshold
22:00 - 22:30
Drawing workshop Scene & Seen
TICKETS
€5.00
Cineville card free
CAVIA
PROGRAM of
ACU
Sunday 26.10.2025
19:00
Doors Open
19:30 - 20:30
Dinner with Barricade
20:30 - 20:40
Introduction
20:40 - 22:00
Short Film Program Part I
Unearthed Lives: Women at the Threshold
TICKETS
€3.00
ACU
PROGRAM of WORM Rotterdam
Wednesday 29.10.2025
20:30 - 20:35
Introduction
20:35 - 21:35
Short Film Program Part II
Experimental Cartographies of Love, Loss, and Memory
TICKETS
€10.00
Cineville card free
WORM
PROGRAM of
KINO Rotterdam
Sunday 02.11.2025
18:30 - 18:35
Introduction
18:35 - 20:40
Screening of Longer than a Day
20:40 - 21:00
Q&A with the director Malika Mukhamejan
TICKETS
€13.20 (CJP/Student €10.00)
Cineville card free
KINO
PROGRAM of FOCUS Arnhem
Wednesday 05.11.2025
19:00 - 19:05
Introduction
19:05 - 20:45
Screening of Bikechess
TICKETS
€12.00 (Student €5.00)
Cineville card free
FOCUS
PROGRAM of Plaatsmaken Arnhem
Thursday 06.11.2025
19:00 - 19:05
Introduction
19:05 - 20:00
Short Film Program Part II
Experimental Cartographies of Love, Loss, and Memory
20:00 - 20:15
Performance by
Darya Andijan
20:15 - 20:45
Drawing workshop Scene & Seen
Entrance is free
Plaatsmaken
PROGRAM of
Framer Framed Amsterdam
Friday 07.11.2025
18:00 - 18:05
Introduction
18:05 - 19:15
Experimental Cartographies of Love, Loss, and Memory
19:15 - 20:00 Artist talk by
Darya Andijan,
Aiganym Mukhamejan and Polina Piddubna
Entrance is free
Framer Framed
PROGRAM of Droog Amsterdam
Sunday 09.11.2025
19:00 - 19:05
Introduction
19:05 - 20:25
Screening of Madina
TICKETS
€7,50
Droog
ABOUT
QYZQARAS is an independent platform and annual film festival based in Almaty, Kazakhstan, dedicated to amplifying women’s voices in cinema, with a particular focus on Central Asia. Founded in 2023, QYZQARAS aims to challenge dominant narratives, support emerging filmmakers, and provide space for underrepresented perspectives through film screenings, discussions, and educational initiatives. Its motto — “women’s perspectives through the lens of cinema” — reflects its commitment to feminist curatorial practices and the creation of a transnational community of artists, thinkers, and audiences.
Darya Andijan. Born in the Uyghur region and based in the Netherlands. Her works weave myths, poetry, and family history to challenge oppression and colonial erasure.
She utilizes film, performance, and writing to reconnect fragmented histories and amplify women’s voices in Central Asia. Through these practices, she creates spaces where forgotten histories are remembered and reimagined.
Polina Piddubna.
Filmmaker, artist and activist with Ukrainian and Central Asian Tatar and Bashqort roots. Polina was born
and raised in Kharkiv, started her career in Kyiv, and has been living in Berlin since 2019. She has a
bachelor's degree in animation and is currently doing her master's as an animation director at the Film
University Babelsberg Konrad Wolf in Potsdam. Polina also organises social and educational projects,
works at film festivals and does artistic research on decolonial topics.
Curator
Malika Mukhamejan is a curator and filmmaker whose work elevates diverse voices in Central Asian cinema, exploring women’s representation, and fostering community through film. She is the founder of Qyzqaras, an Almaty-based film festival dedicated to female filmmaking, which has just celebrated its most recent edition: Qyzqaras Film Festival 2025.
Supported by
Arnhem Gemeente, Het Cultuurfonds and VSB fonds
The Rock
Altynai Adamalieva / Kyrgyzstan / 2024 / 17’
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Working in livestock breeding is much harder when the farmer is a fragile and delicate woman. What feelings does she experience? Does she want to change her life? Has this become a heavy burden for her? Only she knows her most intimate, unspoken secrets.
Alone in a Dance for Two
Mehrangez Saidmamadova / Tajikistan / 2025 / 11’
Bikechess
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A former labour migrant RANO (36), turned an ambitious director of a provincial Russian drama theatre in a small Tajik town, attempting to make the theatre function, despite challenges by the management.
Joqtau
Aibota Kali / Kazakhstan / 2023 / 15’
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After her father’s sudden death, a 15-year-old Aisha is unable to cry and becomes the target of her mocking neighbor, forcing her to confront her numbness and find a way to release her grief.
The Late Wind
Shugyla Serzhan / Kazakhstan / 2023 / 22’
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Saigonese DJ Van Anh and her girlfriend Ly are struggling to end their relationship. Then a strange woman shows up to free the spirit of her long lost Father from their apartment.
Kündelık.Almaty
Aiganym Mukhamejan / Kazakhstan /2024 / 11’
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Triggered by an old family photograph, a young adult named Azka retraces their childhood - a sacred stage of life when they became aware of the external world around them and their inner self. While revisiting these long-forgotten memories, Azka discovers unresolved pains they never knew existed. This revelation marks a new beginning, one that unfolds the tapestry of profound self-embrace and acceptance, allowing Azka to move forward unapologetically into their truest essence.
Voiceless
Saadat Sataeva / Kyrgyzstan / 2025 / 15’
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Voiceless is an essay film exploring a long-distance relationship between two anonymous young women — one in Ukraine, the other in Kyrgyzstan. We never see their faces. Instead, the film lingers on the details of their everyday environments: quiet domestic spaces, passing landscapes, traces of their presence. Their connection unfolds through text exchanges and silent phone calls, where emotion is carried by pauses, glances, and the unsaid.
Through absence and atmosphere, Voiceless becomes a tender meditation on queer love, separation, a
nd the quiet forms of communication that endure despite distance and invisibility.
Lady of Heaven
Darya Andijan / Netherlands / 2024 / 9’
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This is a journey through the skies on a flying carpet with my grandmother who has just been released from a concentration camp in Xinjiang, China. As we soar, the carpet transforms into a tapestry of Sumerian myths, dreams, and fragmented memories, intertwining the past with the present of maternal history in Turkestan.
Balqaş Jyry
Artcom / Kazakhstan / 2025 / 19’
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In this video essay dedicated to Lake Balqaş, the artists of the Artcom collective draw on the form of epic poetry (zhyr) and the tradition of qazaqylyq to tell the story of a profound bond between nature and humans, a bond fractured by colonialism, industrialization, and ecological violence. One of their aims is to restore the lake’s agency: its capacity for resistance, its right to regeneration, and its future.
Longer than a Day
Malika Mukhamejan / Kazakhstan, Russia, Italy / 2024 / 122’
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Karlygash (whose name translates as “swallow”) lives with her husband Ilyas and father-in-law on a horse farm in the Kazakh steppe. A stranger in this household, she finds her fragile place unsettled by the arrival of Louis, a traveling French photographer.
Madina
Aizhan Kassymbek / Kazakhstan, Pakistan / 2023 / 77’
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Single mother Madina teaches dance by day and works at a burlesque club by night. Fending off men’s advances, she raises a two-year-old daughter. Restrained imagery reflects her emotions.
Bikechess
Assel Aushakimova / Kazakhstan, France / 2024 / 100’
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Disenchanted Kazakh journalist Dina balances supporting her activist lesbian sister while navigating a relationship with her married cameraman.
